Chemical plant safetyChemical plants safety must be tightened to prevent a Bhopal-like disaster in the U.S.

Late last week, hundreds of individuals and organizations sent a letter to President Barack Obama to say that time was running out for taking action to protect the U.S. population from the dangers of accidents or deliberate attacks at U.S. chemical plants.

David Halperin writes in the Huffington Post that eleven years ago he co-authored on op-ed in the New York Times about the very same issue (Rick Hind and David Halperin, “Lots of Chemicals, Little Reaction,” New York Times, 22 September 2004), but that not much has changed since then.

“There was then — and there is now — a real risk of another terrible chemical catastrophe, like India’s massive Bhopal tragedy,” Halperin writes (on 2-3 December 1984, more than 500,000 people in the Indian city of Bhopal were exposed to methyl isocyanate [MIC] gas and other chemicals from the near-by Union Carbide plant. About 16,000 died and 558,000 injured, 3,900 of them permanently disabled).

“In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, it seemed clearer than ever that such a chemical disaster could be triggered not only by accident but also by terrorists,” he says.

As a senator, Obama described chemical facilities in which dangerous chemicals were processed or stored as “stationary weapons of mass destruction spread all across the country.”

After an April 2013 ammonium nitrate explosion in West, Texas, which killed fifteen people and injured 160, Obama ordered new measures, and federal agencies have been developing new rules.

“We don’t know yet how strong these rules will be, but we do know now that the agencies have set a timetable that seems to be too slow to ensure progress,” Halperin writes. “The next president may not share President Obama’s concern with this serious national security issue, or his determination to take on special interests in order to get real reforms.”